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Memorium in the Atheneum/Text
Janeth sat on a stairway. The rest of the companions made their excuses and ducked back to their rooms, or went to get a bite to eat, or did whatever they needed to do to recoup from this near-death experience and cope with the possibility that the Doctor might be dead. Around him, the TARDIS began to remove the damaged bits and adapt a new color scheme and appearance. The old desktop melted away like film on an overheating projector, dissipating before his eyes. Janeth sighs as he stares off, lost in thought. “Something wrong?” Ellie asked, concerned. Her eyestalk had retracted, and her forehead had an angry scab in its place. “Want to have some souffle with the others?” “I’m fine," said Janeth. "It’s just… I wonder if they’re alright.” “Wonder if who’s alright?” Ellie asked. “My people. My family. My home.” “Want to go check on them? We’ve got a time machine, and I think the Time-Space Visualiser might be working. Depending on where it is in this configuration.” “Visualiser? As in some kind of monitor?” “Basically, yeah.” “Well… for them it must have been years. Might as well see, right?” “Again, time machine. We can look at them at basically any point you want. Or we could check on the Beatles.” “I want to know if they’re alright now. If they survived the Cybermen.” “…Although, wait. The Doctor has a thing where the past can’t be rewritten once you’ve read it.” Although, privately, Ellie could think of a few less-than-flattering things to say about that so-called rule. “This Doctor isn’t here, and you said my presence alone would be objectionable.” “If you want to go back to them, if you want to help them, then maybe checking it out would be less than ideal. And his thing is about military types. He does like helping those in need though. He wouldn’t object to getting you away from there.” “But that’s the thing: when you all ran checks on me, none of you could figure out what my deal was. What if… whatever happened to me… prevents me from going home? What if it did something else?” “It’s a law of time. It can’t be broken." What Ellie didn’t say was that laws of time were rubbish, and that Janeth,lovely as he may be, wasn’t exactly cultist material. “If you want us to check your family, and you’re not there, it could prevent you from ever returning to them. If you don’t check, you’ll probably able to do whatever you want. Just to be safe, it might be an idea to turn down the chaotic limiter settings. Assuming the Type 40 even has one.” If it did, it was becoming rapidly difficult to locate, as the console had begun rearranging itself into a configuration that, while retaining the hexagonal shape and central column, had completely upended everything else. “I suppose checking could be sorted out later, if it’s that much of a mess,” Janeth said. “In the meantime, what is this ship’s deal? I’ve been seeing panels pop out and replacements come from nowhere since I got on here.” “It’s a quasi-sentient space-time event. She, I mean. Sorry.” “Is pronoun trouble a regular thing? I mean, you kept referring to this Doctor as both he and she.” “…Did I? I didn’t think I did. Well, the Doctor changes sometimes. The Doctor’s really fluid. Like mercury.” As Ellie said this, she rubbed her hand along one of the exposed mercury fluid links. “Poisonous for consumption too, I take it?” “Quite possibly, yes.” “Alright then. An avian alien, an AI, a liberated human Dalek, a big strong… whatever-Brom-is, and an alien that sometimes changes shape in charge of a ship with its own skewed sense of interior design. This is a very weird situation, to say the least.” “Hold on," Ellie asked, "why did she even take us to the Cybership in the first place?” “Maybe the Cybermen somehow got a lock on it while it travelled? I mean, they were able to trap it.” “But that’s not supposed to be possible. I mean, most of the time it doesn’t travel, it just sort of moves us around. The exterior and the interior aren’t even in the same place.” “Minutes ago I didn’t believe time travel was supposed to be possible. And yet here we are.” “It all works under a series of ludicrous calculations only possible by organic…” Ellie paused, trying to catch up with what Janeth was saying. “…Hold on, the time agency was in the 51st century. It was secret, but not a good secret. How can you not know about these things?” “My home was a distantly-removed colony world. We didn’t get much in terms of news.” “Every colony’s got to have a starliner of some kind. And most civilizations have at least heard rumors and legends. Especially human colonies. The blue box that falls from the sky and saves the day.” Ellie was trying not to sound too bitter. She decided to sacrifice herself back at the asylum. Not rescuing her wasn’t the Doctor’s fault. Janeth sighed and started going into a calm explanation. “The colony that formed Sohamfrom wanted to try its own hand at developing on a new world. According to records, the world only got founded at roughly the 100th century. And after finding a world suitable for proper development along the lines of the old planet Earth, the ship landed and… basically disassembled itself.” “…Sounds familiar. This isn’t going to end with the story of ‘a man that never would’, is it?” “The people from it were basically given the essentials, plus blueprints for what would eventually come down the line. They didn’t redevelop space transmission technology until roughly the 120th century.” “Ah. Roughing it then.” “But when they did… they caught whispers. Utterings of things they knew by instinct not to like. Things such as the Daleks and the Cybermen.” “…Sorry, it’s just that Daleks aren’t normally associated with whispers. And there’s not a lot of the universe they’ve never been to.” “Not literal whispers. I guess it might have been bad luck or something, because while Sohamfron was never invaded by Daleks…it was hit by Cybermen.” “I’d guessed that much. Weird, though. Pulled forward by that many decades?”” “You’re telling me. I have some faith that Sohamfron might have been able to hold its own. They managed to fight off the Cybermen for a good chunk of two centuries. But… I don’t know, uncertainy always just nags at me whenever it rears its ugly head.” Ellie glanced at him, wondered how to get a good biodata sample without him noticing, then wondered how she’d be able to analyze it, given the lack of a shrine, then gave up on the whole prospect. “Anyway, I don’t think you’ve been given a tour yet. Want one?” “I get the feeling I might be stuck here for a long while. Why not?” “Okay, what do you want to see? The kitchen, where I’ve got the rest of the souffle? The swimming pool? The library? The black hole? The Cloister room? It's got bells. Movie theatre?” “… Why does this place have a black hole?” “Power supply. And because black holes bend time and space around them.” “… I’ll just chalk that up to quantum mechanics and leave it at that. You said there was a library?” “There is indeed.” A small smile forms on Janeth’s face. “Let’s be off, then.” The staircase they’re sitting on begins to recolor itself and swing across to another end of the room entirely, leading up now to a doorway that hadn’t been there two seconds ago. They set off. Because the TARDIS rearranges itself, there’s not any specific route. They get to where the TARDIS wants them to go, when She wants them to get there. “Seriously," Ellie asked, "do you want this part of the souffle?” “Believe it or not, I ate a big meal before my mission. I’ll be fine.” “Okay, suit yourself.” Ellie eats the souffle. “Feels like we’ve been moving about for hours and for seconds at the same time. That kind of thing normal here?” Ellie considered mentioning her apartment at the Eleven Day Empire but decided not to. “It’s normal enough for what it is.” At the top of the stairs is a doorway leading into a hallway. Ellie and Janeth begin to hover about as doors present themselves in seemingly random location on the sides of the hall. Janeth opens a nearby door and looks inside. “Oh hey, swimming pool.” It is indeed the swimming pool, though not the room proper. Water hovers in front of him, immune to what little gravity the place has left, and the pool area itself can be hazily made out out the top. “Not really dressed for a swim,” Ellie remarks. He closes the door and keeps moving. “Definitely not.” Ellie opens another door, expecting a surprise from the TARDIS at the contents. “… Is that a ticket booth?” Janeth asked. It is a ticket booth. There’s nothing around it. It’s just a ticket booth. There’s an entire, if somewhat small, room, devoted to this ticket booth for no evident reason. “Huh.” Ellie tries another door. It’s a massive room filled to the brim with assorted monitors and screens—some lining the walls, some hanging from the ceiling, a few holographic projections hovering about. “At this point," Janeth remarked, "I’m wondering if the ship enjoys messing about with its passengers.” “Wouldn’t you?” “Never really had a chance to. Too busy reading up on general history and learning where to shoot.” “…You haven’t even had any chances to mess with people?” Ellie was appalled. Faction Paradox fully recognized the importance of fun, preferably at someone’s expense. What was the point of a carnival otherwise? “Sohamfron got really militant about five years after the Cybermen found it. Practical jokes were sentenced with brig time.” “Yikes. I can’t imagine spending that long with Alistair.” “Who?” Ellie paused. “…Now when you say ‘brig time’ what do you mean by that?” “Brig-related punishment. Depending on the severity of the joke, you either spent your time in it, or were forced to spend time cleaning all of it.” “…Again, when you say ‘brig-related’ you mean incarceration, right? Not a particular brigadier general, right? Sorry. Got confused for a second there.” “It’s okay. But yeah - for some reason, teens loved trying to go for both at the same time. Seemed to be the highest honor for them, for reasons I couldn’t be bothered to understand.”” Ellie tries a different door. It’s the library, finally, appearing to extend infinitely outwards from the door. “… Woah,” Janeth said in awe. “Pretty cool, yeah?” Ellie asked. “It would be too forward to ask for a bed here, wouldn’t it?” “I don’t think so.” Ellie glanced up. “Can he?” she asked the ceiling. “If she wants you to have one you’ll spot it eventually. Anyway, where do you want to start?” Ellie decided she could spend a little bit of time here. It was definitely safer then the Stacks. “Well, that’s the beauty of libraries.” He walks up to a shelf and reaches for a book. “You can start anywhere.” “I wonder if there’s a copy of the manual in here. Or maybe The History Of The Time War. Haven’t read it in ages.”” “There was a war for time?” “There were at least three. Depending on how you count. It gets complicated.” “Sounds like an abstract subject.” “Abstract doesn’t begin to cover it.” “Heh. Might be worth a look later.” “I wasn’t there. For any of them. Not many were. The Doctor was unlucky enough to have been in two.” “I find it strange that anyone would willingly get into wars over the concept of time, much less the same person being present for two of said wars.” “It is strange, isn’t it? I mean, a civilization with time travel has basically unlimited resources. All of time and space at their fingertips. Not anything to compete over really.” He looked at the cover for the book he grabbed. “Dante’s Inferno… Good read.” He puts it back. “If that’s the case, then couldn’t a time war go on indefinitely in theory? You’d think that even my people would’ve heard of it.” “Well, yeah, except for the protocols of linearity. And your people don’t seem to have heard of very much, no offense. I mean, a lot of civilizations are still recovering from the last War. Zygons, Nestene, countless others. I mean, the First War supposedly happened so far back that not much had developed yet.” “How does that work? Cavemen getting a hold of space-time-sticks and bashing each other?” “Humans aren’t the only species out there. And there’s somethings that barely qualify as ‘species’.” “Cavemen analogues, then.” “No, not really. The way I heard it, it was the Doctor’s people. They set up the whole ‘time’ thing. The framework of history. And when they set down all the rules they accidentally punched a whole in the universe in the process. A big one.” “So in the beginning there was time, and somebody decided that was a very bad thing? That’s almost as bad as saying the same thing about the universe.” “No. Well. Yes. I mean, time and history aren’t quite the same thing.” “The people of the Doctor’s Homeworld, they experienced time one way. They were the first civilization to exist. But they were scared, because other beings might not experience time the same way they did. Which could be dangerous. Quantum. So they set things up so the way they percieved time would be universal. Lots of technology. Things sorta like the TARDIS here. Except not quite.” Ellie paused. “…Also, things like the black hole. Anyway. They set up history. the framework the events fit into. Punched a hole in the universe. Then the first War started. It’s not entirely clear what that War was with. “I’d probably guess a different universe.” “Not necessarily. One theory was just that the things were just a result of the two universes intersecting. Like foam or frayed edges tangling.” Janeth finds a table and chair behind another one of the shelves, and moves to it. Setting his rifle onto the table and taking a seat, he stretches and relaxes as he listenes to Ellie. “Well, who can say, really? I mean, if it were that easy to figure out, maybe these people would still be around.” “Look, it’s complicated, and I’m going off of things I heard the Doctor say, things she’s more willing to talk about lately. Things I picked up in conversation. Some things from the Daleks. Some things my Little Siblings and Cousins and Parents and Godparents taught me. And some things from books in this library.” He raises an eyebrow. “Sounds like you’ve had an interesting life.” “…And I think the Doctor’s people might still be around. Maybe. Yeah, the Doctor’s people are back, I remember now.” “In any case, that reminds me: any idea what we’re going to do about this Doctor situation?” “I have no idea. I don’t think the TARDIS would appreciate us just abandoning her. I don’t think I like the idea myself. I do think we need to rest though. The TARDIS herself might need some recovery too. If she doesn’t mind, and I can find the manual, I might try giving her a tune-up.” Ellie picked a book off the shelf, without looking, and found herself holding a copy of Aschripbd: The Life and Times by Horkford Yollopminsin. It’s about a foot thick and bound in leather. “Ash-rip-bid?” Janeth asks. It’s actually pronounced Yansinfinaskmin, though there’s no way to determine this from the cover. “Well, you do what you can. If you need any help, I’ll be here. Just killing time. Not literally.” Ellie’s not sure whether she’d prefer to kill the Eternal named “Time” or the disembodied Elder God obsessed with robotic Yeti. She opened Aschripbd to the table of contents. There’s three sections: “Life”, “Times”, and “Mfjahdnghr-4”. “Odd book so far.” Janeth got up and pulled a couple more off the shelves, brought them back to the table and found himself with the titles Relationship Maintence: Pleasing your Robot and Last Wills and Testiments: The Complete Collection. The former is thicker than one’d expect, the latter far smaller. Ellie opened her book to “Mfjahdnghr-4” with one hand while with her other hand she pulled another book off the shelf, wondering if it was the TARDIS manual, The Book Of The War, The Book Of The Peace, or the journal of Christine Summerfield/Cousin Eliza, as collected in Dead Romance. Instead, it’s the 2359th edition of volume one of Enterprise Eruditorium: An Unofficial Critical History of Star Trek. “Do I even want to know why robosexuality is a thing?” Janeth asked. Ellie frowned. “Why wouldn’t it be?” Ellie wondered how Cousin Pinocchio was doing. Placing “Last Wills” on top of the other book, Janeth opened it up to the table of contents. The print was absurdly fine, but fortunately there’s a magnifying glass tied to the end of the piece of string that served as a bookmark. “The hell?” He takes the magnifying glass and tries looking over the text. The table of contents for “Last Wills” is basically a phone book, an alphabetical listing of everyone who ever lived. Somehow, despite the assorted alphabets this required it to reconcile, the first was still the will of Aaron Aaronson. “Have you been able to find anything?" he asked Ellie. "I’m looking over some kind of book of wills that doesn’t seem to say where it’s from.” Ellie went to another shelf, and started looking for other books, hoping one would be the TARDIS manual, or Summer Falls, or The Angel’s Kiss. Amelia Williams was always her favorite author. The Melody Malone series got a bit ridiculous at times though. Most of these books would be available if she looked hard enough, except for the manual. “Alright, could you point me in the direction of the manual please? I mean, you had a lot of burns in there. You’re fixing them now, but I know that’s not always enough. I’m not going to change things that you like the way they are. I like you as a police box too. Everybody does.” “I don’t even know what a police box is,” Janeth chimed in. “Sorry, wasn’t talking to you.” “Just saying. Good lord, this book’s contents are frustrating.” Janeth got up to grab a couple more books. “Let’s see…” He found a ladder nearby and used it to get to the top of the shelf, grabbing two more books. A Complete Encyclopedia of Mourning Rituals and Reaper Man found their way into Janeth’s hands. He climbed down and looked at the covers. “This looks dark, and this looks silly AND dark.” “I know how you work. I know he keeps throwing out the manual. And it keeps reappearing. Pretty sure that’s your doing.” Ellie paused. "She. Sorry. I know that’s rude of me.” Suddenly, a book fell off its shelf in front of Ellie. Big yellow thing, about two feet thick. The title read TT Type 40 Module: Complete Instructions. "What’s that you’ve got there?” Janeth asked. “I found the manual. Think I’ll head back to the console room with it." Ellie glanced at Reaper Man, and thought about her mask. She hadn’t worn it in a while. It was probably lonely. "I’m not sure, but I think she might be trying to tell you something.” “Hmm.” He considered this. " Well, you can go on ahead and fix things. I’m sure I’ll be fine. Thank you for the tour and the talk, at the least.” “Take care in here.” Ellie waved ‘bye’ and walked out the door back into the corridor. The doors on the walls had rearranged themselves, but the corridor still, thankfully, lead directly back to the stairs to the console room. He waved back, then turned back to the table and the books he’d found. “Hmm…” Thinking about the words Ellie left him, he arranged the books, laying flat in order that he’d found them. Ellie walked down the stairs, sat on them, and opened up to the table of contents. The table of contents was strangely absent. Instead, a large number “35192527” took up the whole of the page. Ellie memorized the number, then flipped through other pages to try to see what information she could find. All of the right-hand side pages had those numbers on them, the left hand side pages all read the word “BACK” in large letters. “Hmm. Okay, sorry, could you please help me with this? Like, I mean, I heard about the way you could control Laura Tobin sometimes. And onetime I sorta snarked with your voice interface. There was a haunted house and…" As if in response, a large gust of wind blew out of the corridor Ellie had left. "…Okay, back to the corridor.” She went back. The door to the library was still wide open. “…You want me to fix something in the library? Unless I need the manual to understanding this manual, in which case I can see why she keeps throwing it out.” Ellie heads back into the library. Meanwhile, inside, the realization started hitting Janeth. He looked up at the ceiling and sighed. If his eyes could’ve expressed sadness, they would’ve. Moving the other books out of the way, he sat down and started reading the Mourning Rituals book. The type for that was also ungodly small, though there’s a microscope on there as well. The table that Janeth was sitting at, suddenly and without warning, violently upended itself, and the Last Wills and Testaments book lands at Ellie’s feet. “Ahh!” Janeth fell back from being upended by the upending, falling out of his chair. “Ohh…what the hell, TARDIS?” Ellie sighed, opened the book, extended her eyestalk, set it to its magnification settings, to be adjusted as necessary. Her memory will tell her what she needs to know from her scans. Ellie looked through the table of contents. The listing “Doctor, The - 35192527” caught her attention. She took note of that, and recognized the number, but isn’t especially concerned. If the Doctor was dead the TARDIS would be a lot more upset. To the extent that Brom, Zinnia and Hal wouldn’t just be goofing off. Also the Doctor had died before. And then had not died. Ellie herself was a result of a death of the Doctor that had not taken place. Instead she looked through the book for names she recognized. There were a lot of Oswalds, and Simeons. Finally, Ellie turned to the section indicated as the Doctor’s. She scans the section. Janeth finally gets up and starts looking around, putting the table back in place. “Great… damn thing’s gone somewhere now.” There were a lot of different wills from a lot of different points in time, but Ellie eventually noticed her name and the name of her compatriots in it. “Why is the Doctor’s will in your manual?” she asked the TARDIS. Janeth noticed Ellie’s voice and looks over. “Back so soon? Did you find anything?” “Just the Doctor’s will. And all of ours. Weird, I haven’t gotten around to writing it yet.” She went back to talking to the TARDIS. “Is she leaving you to us? Again, why is that in your manual? Secondly, I was born to save the Doctor, and I’d quite like to do that, even if I have to tear the laws of time apart to do so. I mean, I finally got the souffle recipe down. She said I couldn’t. I need to rub her nose in it.” Ellie activated a neat peace of software that basically means she’s projecting the will in the Doctor’s voice as she reads. “To Whom It May Concern,” the will began. “Well, actually, it concerns quite a lot of folks, quite possibly the whole of the Universe, so I suppose you should scratch that and just write ‘To Everyone’. Yes, that’s better, do that. No, no, don’t just write down everything I’m—oh, never mind, let’s get on with it.” "Yes, get on with it,” Ellie said, interupting the playback briefly. “Someone’s just quoted Monty Python, I suppose, so that’s nice. In any case—To Everyone. Please don’t be too concerned, this sort of thing happens all the time, and I’m sure I’ve found a way out of it, but in case I haven’t, maybe do be concerned, actually. Nothing’s guaranteed, after all. Thinking about it now I suppose I don’t actually have a lot to say to everyone. And I’ve addressed everyone I’ve known personally in previous wills, so let’s skip ahead to the current set. Keep it brief. This is already getting tedious. To Brom, Ellie, Hal and Zinnia. I don’t have a lot to leave you, I suppose, except the TARDIS. I’ll thank you to leave her be until she reaches her final resting place, which she might do immediately or decades and decades from now. She probably won’t tell you, of course. She’s quite cryptic. It’s one of the traits she and I share.” “Terrific,” Janeth muttered. Ellie pauses the playback for a moment. “I will run her and all of us ragged to save you if necessary.” Ellie resumes playback. “I should hope that she’d drop you all off somewhere nice before she does, though. Cemetery planets are such dreary places. She might not land on a cemetery planet, of course. She might land somewhere nice, like Songhaven. Have I ever told you about Songhaven? Lovely place, except of course for the ban on singing…anyway…” “Oh! She might come looking for me. Or you might have to do that. Regardless. I expect she might let you pretend to fly her. Quite generous of her to let me all these years. Thank you, dear, if you’re reading this.” “Odd sense of humor is another trait, I take it?” Janeth asked. “Very much so,” Ellie and the Doctor's will said in unison. A look of slight confusion appeared on Janeth’s face. Ellie glances up. “…You honestly can’t be taking this as well as you are.” “I’m not the one who knew her,” Janeth replied. “Not you!” Ellie went back to talking at the ceiling, or floor, or walls, or... “I mean, you dragged us to a bloody cybership in the middle of nowhere!” If the TARDIS responded, it wasn’t in any way Ellie could notice. “You know who I am, where I come from. You didn’t like me when I first met the Doctor because I was ‘impossible’. You know what’s different about me since then. You know exactly what’s in my closet. You know that I’m not going to give up on her.” Janeth would make a mental note to ask about that ‘impossible’ thing at a better time. A lightbulb flickered above Ellie. Beyond that the room remained still. Ellie looked up at said light bulb. Despite what cartoons she’d seen as a nanny indicated, she did not have any ideas. She went back to reading. “Now then! Seeing as that’s really all I have to leave you, except of course for all the accumulated wealth and estates I’ve piled up over the years and forgotten about entirely that you’re welcome to claim if you can get it sorted, it’s time for that part of every will where I deal with any remaining emotional baggage I’ve left unresolved. You each get your own sections, and while I recommend you don’t read each other’s you can sort that out yourselves.” Ellie didn’t care much about wealth. She wasn’t allowed much in the way of possessions anyway. And besides, legal matters were not her forte. “…I don’t remember if Brom learned how to read. And it’s kind of rude to not sort out emotional baggage beforehand.” “Well, you did a good job reading that. Maybe you could read it to him?” Janeth paused. “Is Brom a him? I never asked." “She said not to read each other’s,” Ellie replied, "and Brom's nonbinary." “Well, somebody’s gonna have to teach Brom how to read, then.” Ellie stared at the walls, ceiling and floor. She was upset. Against all better judgement, and in a fit of pique, she went for a low-blow. “I can’t believe that I care for her more than you do.” There was no response. “…Okay, shit, now I’m really worried about you, because the last time we had this conversation your voice interface activated and I called you a ‘cow’ and you implied I only care about myself and…and sorry, I shouldn’t have said that it was awful and I didn’t mean it and.” Janeth placed a hand on Ellie’s shoulder, in a moment of empathy. Ellie drew a long, shuddering breath. “Thank you, Janeth.” Ellie started to address the TARDIS again “…Right. None of this helps me insofar as getting you fixed up. I mean, I don’t understand why page number for the Doctor’s will is in your manual anyway. Maybe if I fix you some more you’ll feel good enough to be mad at me for what I said. Why me? And why couldn’t we wait until Brom, Zinnia and Hal were up? Why do I have to break it to them?” “Maybe it’s there because she knew you would find it?” Janeth suggested. “… Because you’re ‘impossible’?” He shrugged. “…Oh. Right. This is getting back at me then. Before I even said it.” “Well, nobody ever said the impossible was bad by default.” Ellie smiled slightly. “Have you ever thought about how you’d look in a skull mask, old girl? I gotta say, you’re qualified.” “Sometimes it takes the impossible to handle the impossible.” Ellie was ignoring Janeth in favor of the room she was in. Not very polite of her. But then, she’d not known him for very long. She had known the TARDIS for a very long time indeed. Ellie put a bookmark in the book of the wills, and closed it. With her implants, there was the risk of accidentally reading the “baggage” of one of the others and not being able to forget it. “…Alright, Janeth, it’s been a long day. I think we should all go to bed. Hopefully there’s a bed in here somewhere for you, if not, the bedrooms are usually close together.” “Yeah… Long day.” Ellie picked up the book of last wills, the TARDIS manual, and began to exit the library. “Goodnight, Janeth. Welcome to the TARDIS.” There’s suddenly two doors where the door out of the library had been. Ellie opened one of them, then the other. One was the proper way out. The other was a new bedroom. “Guess you’ve got a room here after all.” “Well, that’s good.” He approached his door. “Hopefully, it’s got something strong for me.” “Hopefully. Sleep well.” “Thanks. Good night, impossible girl.” Janeth takes his door, shutting it behind him and moving to rest. Ellie walks out into the corridor. It's changed from before, this time leading further around in the other direction, and the stairs from before were now absent. She opened a door. Inside is the ticket booth again. This time, there’s a little box wrapped in gift paper on the counter. Ellie picked up the box and looks at it. It’s a perfectly ordinary box, though the gift paper is a garish shade of green. “FOR ELLIE” is scrawled crudely on the underside. Ellie took it, and left the ticket booth room, heading down the corridor to her own bedroom. She could open it there. There are doors all over the corridor, and a fork—not, in fact, an intersection—towards the end of it. “It’s been a long day. I just want to sleep. Can I get to my room please?” Ellie asked. “I know you’re probably mad at me. And I know I deserve it.” A door creeked opened beneath her feet. Ellie glanced at it, and looked inside. It was, at long last, her room. Ellie entered, went to her closet, and pulled out some materials: her mask, some candles, some ash, some herbs, and one of Brom’s other pigs xe left behind, still alive, and a knife. She took her mask, and put it on. She sat them on the floor in front of her bed, sat down, and unwrapped the box. Underneath the hideous gift paper, the box is a nice cardboard brown. She opened it and looked inside, finding a crude drawing of a Dalek, a familiar skull mask draped over its eyestalk, on what appears to be prescription paper. Underneath, in chicken scrawl: “ADMIT. ONE FREE PASS.”, followed by what might’ve been a signature. Ellie sighed. “Knew all along. Of course." Ellie takes the ash, the candles, the herbs, and her own welling tears and inscribes them into a ritual circle on the floor of her room. She lights the candles, takes the knife, pulls up her sleeve, and cuts lightly along the wrist, just, enough to draw a light amount of blood. She holds her arm over the circle, and the blood is seemingly sucked off the blade and out of her arm and into the seal. She takes the now clean knife, and the pig, and slits its throat. Again, the blood doesn’t stay on the knife, leaving it clean. The dead pig is placed in the centre of the circle. “I’m not giving up on you yet.” She begins to chant. “From life to life, in continual transgression…” Meanwhile, in his bedroom, Janeth found himself lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. His uniform lay crumpled in a corner of the room. Next to his bed was a glass with traces of a clear substance, with a bottle of the stuff half-empty. When he’d gotten his eyes, they had to remove his tear ducts. He couldn’t cry even though he wanted to. “I don’t wanna give up… But what do I do?”